Environmental Regulation, Public Credibility, and Boundary Work: Mountaintop Removal and the Rationalization of Earthly Destruction

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Abstract

In Bragg vs. Robertson (1998), coalfield residents along with the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy environmental group successfully brought suit against the director of the West Virginia Division of Environmental
Protection (WVDEP) contesting the legality of his issuance of permits for mountaintop removal coal mining in the region. As part of the Bragg vs. Robertson settlement agreement, WVDEP and several major federal government agencies agreed to undertake a major programmatic environmental impact study (PEIS) in order to assess the environmental impacts of existing mountaintop coal mining practices and explore possible limitations for new mining developments. This project—performed over a period of four and a half years and totaling some 5,000 pages—involved the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. EPA, the U.S. Department of Interior's Office of Surface Mining, the West Virginia Department t of Environmental Protection, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Within this polemically charged regulatory context I engage ‘science’ as highly contingent and actively negotiated symbolic value. This paper engages ‘science in policy’ as an actively negotiated value within a bureaucratized domain of values that characterizes the problem of environmental governance. Engaging Ulrich Beck's theory of the risk society and the STS idiom of ‘boundary work’ (Gieryn 1983), this paper highlights how government agency officials rhetorically distinguish the domain of science from the domain of policy in order to symbolically achieve institutional credibility. Demarcation is conceptualized as a politically charged activity.

Author

• Travis L. Williams, Virginia Commonwealth University